


Snape’s Hareem

by Tales of Josan archivist (nocturnus)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Het, Multi, Written Pre-Half Blood Prince
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-08
Updated: 2017-05-08
Packaged: 2018-10-29 10:51:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10852461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nocturnus/pseuds/Tales%20of%20Josan%20archivist
Summary: Snape provides tea, sympathy and conversation.





	Snape’s Hareem

**Author's Note:**

> This story was originally archived by Josan at her Live Journal blog. She hasn’t updated her blog since 2008.  
> I am merely putting them onto AO3 so that they are safe from any issues on LJ.  
> I'm doing this for the purpose of preserving her fics.

A little thank you

For your patience, for your good wishes and vibes.

Not betaed but sincerely meant.

Oh, and I suppose a small warning: it is het.

 

Snape’s Hareem

by

Josan

 

It began, surprisingly enough, with Granger.

At the beginning of her seventh year at Hogwarts, they finally had the unavoidable battle with Lord Voldemort and his Death Eaters. Of which he was no longer one as his double-life had finally been discovered and Snape had managed, just barely, to escape the revelation with his skin in what one could, with some imagination, call one piece. Well, with enough pieces for Poppy to put him back together again.

So, though he had been involved in the Final Battle, once over he had been relegated to the sidelines. And, for once, he had agreed. He had done his part – and more.

The women of Hogwarts had done their share in the Battle. Many of the newly returned seventh years had fought in the thick of it. Some had been killed. Even if not wounded, those who had survived had been blooded and had not turned from casting the worse curses, even Unforgivables.

So, Snape could understand their frustration, in the days following the Battle, of their being...well, basically being patted on the heads and told to return to their powder and primping. That the clean-up would be left to the men. And thank you for your contribution, but you shouldn’t have to worry your pretty little heads about it any more.

Snape thought that, had McGonagall and Sprout survived, the Headmaster would not have made such a mistake. Snape knew that Dumbledore thought what he was doing was for the best – Didn’t he always? – but somehow the women didn’t see it that way.

Granger was the first who knocked on his door, supposedly to hand in an assignment that he had set for his NEWT-level class.

Now, that she had done the assignment was not that much of a surprise. But that she had knocked on the door of his private quarters was.

He attributed the fact that he let her in to that surprise.

She stomped in.

There was a lot of female stomping these days Snape suddenly realised, as she threw the scroll onto his desk. He stood by the door, expecting her to leave with the same deliberate determination. Instead, she screamed.

After a worried glance down the hallway, Snape quickly shut the door. He wondered if this was some Gryffindor trick to have him up on some kind of accusation. Instead, once he began listening, he concluded that this was not a scream of rape but of anger.

No. More than anger: enraged frustration.

With his heart returning to its regular beat, he realised that, in among the screams, were words that gradually became more and more coherent as Granger’s frustration at being denied her fair place among the ‘men’ – she spat the word out – was vented.

Snape made his way to his chair by the fire and watched and listened as Granger raged. He said nothing. Mind, he found he did agree with her. She had been in the thick of battle, protecting Potter’s back. She’d been wounded and hadn’t allowed that to hold her back. And she hadn’t been the only one.

And now, to be treated like "a fragile little flower" was a little too much.

The spewing of anger and hurt diminished to be followed by tears of self-anger and embarrassment at her behaviour. Snape pulled out a clean handkerchief from his pocket and offered it to her. As she dealt with the clean-up, he called for tea and offered sympathy. He was far too familiar with frustration himself.

He’d put his life and sanity on the line for the Light and, though they were publically acknowledging him – reluctantly, he sensed, and feeling that their hand had been forced by Voldemort’s treatment of him – they had been all too happy to find a reason to exclude him from the limelight. That he’d helped them with his acceptance didn’t lessen his sense of exclusion.

Granger drank the tea, acknowledging that his sympathy had been based on his own experiences, and went back to the Gryffindor Tower. Where she washed the handkerchief herself before returning it to him...the next evening.

It was only polite of him to invite her in and offer her tea.

The next night, she returned. But not alone. Susan Bones, Hufflepuff, was by her side.

Hufflepuff had spilt its fair share of blood in the Battle. With a certain ferocity. A fact that had taken many by surprise. Which fact had led some who should have known better – like Dumbledore! – to assume that they would want to hurry back to their stereotyped behaviour as soon as possible.

Granger handed Bones his newly cleaned handkerchief when she arrived at the tears portion of her venting.

Then the women sat on his couch and wondered at the stupidity of "men". Present company excepted, of course.

Of course, Snape found himself agreeing, a little taken aback by the evening.

And by the way Bones spat the word "men" with a disdain worthy of the best Slytherin.

He was less surprised when, the next evening, at eight o’clock precisely, there was a knock on his door. This time, there were four of them.

Padma Patil was particularly livid at the way the sacrifice of her sister’s life was supposed to be accepted and that she had been counselled – by an admittedly overworked Flitwick – to "move on."

Megan Jones, another Hufflepuff – who, Granger later told him, had been absolutely terrifying in her determination to wipe out any Death Eater who had the misfortune to appear in her sights – still couldn’t believe that the women were being pushed aside.

Snape couldn’t believe that some male had been stupid enough to refer to women in battle as ‘unfeminine’, especially in their hearing. Especially when the male in question had remained safely within the confines of Hogwarts Castle, running errands, during the worst of it.

With some bewilderment at his sudden popularity, Snape handed out handkerchiefs, tea, sympathy and wondered why on earth these women found it possible to come to him. True, he did understand a lot of their feelings, but, hell, he was Severus Snape. The Greasy Git. Right?

He thought it was over, these visits, until two nights later, they were once more at his door; six of them this time, the veterans supporting the newcomers through their expressions of anger and disappointment.

By now his Slytherins were aware of the evening visitors. Pansy Parkinson confronted him about them. She knocked on his door some minutes before what had now become arrival time for Granger and Company, stomped in when he opened it, and began her own venting. Snape was still at the door when the usual knock came and, without thinking, he opened it.

He surreptitiously went for his wand, expecting the usual Slytherin-Gryffindor responses, but was completely taken aback when Granger, staring at Parkinson, nodded and spat out one word.

Men.

Parkinson stopped her rant about Snape’s suspicious attention to the other women and stared back. The venom in her one word response to that caused Snape to step aside to allow the usual visitors in.

It would seem that _his_ women were also feeling underappreciated. Not by him, Parkinson hurried to assure him, as she blew her nose in yet another of his handkerchiefs. The women in Slytherin who had remained to fight against their housemates and families never doubted for one moment his support of and pride in them.

And that was how it had begun. Every few evenings, they would show up at his door, arriving always around eight o’clock. Now and then, a new member would appear, always with the need for a good vent and a cry. Followed by tea, sympathy and now conversation.

Snape gave in and warded the door just for them. At the password – which all swore would remain secret from the hated ‘enemy’ – the ward would chime, letting him know they were arriving, and the door would open for them.

Snape had had some experience with women in his younger days, but more of the bed variety than the sitting around and conversing kind. Oh, he’d learnt early in his career at Hogwarts never to underestimate the brain of any female. As a teacher, McGonagall had never suffered fools kindly. As her colleague, he had too often borne the brunt of her caustic wit.

But it took some time for him to take in that it was indeed he, Severus Snape, who spent most evenings having tea with a variety of females from all Houses, who came to him out of a feeling of...well, kinship, he guessed.

‘Snape’s Hareem’, Dumbledore called them when he became aware of the gatherings. Always with a twinkle that Snape knew wouldn’t have been there if there had been only one or two women. There was safety and correctness in numbers.

The numbers grew the day that Granger responded to a passing comment from Harry Potter – something about the proper place of women. Would the boy never learn? And instead of hexing him, Granger had turned around and let fly with what he was later informed – with great approval by a Hufflepuff Muggle-born – was "a first class right hook." Seemed the Hero of the Wizarding World had something called a ‘glass jaw’.

That evening, he also learnt that Susan Bones had access to her father’s most excellent wine cellar and that she had appropriated a case of his best merlot.

There wasn’t much call for tea that evening.

By Hallowe’en, his Slytherin males were hanging around the hallway, waiting for the women to leave, offering them a polite escort back to the doors of their common rooms. Parkinson’s view on the stupidity of the average male’s behaviour seemed to have had some effect on her male housemates. It made Snape smile to see seventh year battle-scarred women side by side with Slytherins who were a couple of years younger. Because, sadly, there were very few Slytherin males of their year who had survived.

Of course, that stirred up some rivalry with the males of other Houses, but a few well-placed curses – How quickly they had forgotten what the women had learnt! – got the message across that the women made their own choices.

The Yule dance brought out some inter-House couples that caused a few eyebrows to rise among the staff. Snape, who had always patrolled these affairs, found he didn’t have the time to do so as he was asked to dance far too often. "Snape’s Hareem," chuckled Dumbledore, much to the irritation of Potter and his inner circle, who felt that they should have been dealing with the variety of selections for their dance partners.

Of course, the numbers of his ‘hareem’ dwindled as the women found their feet and other things to do. Still, Snape was surprised to find that a steady core remained. They came to his rooms, now not just for tea, but for conversation, to mine his brain on all topics. He found himself discussing Arithmancy, Transfiguration, as well as Potions. He discovered that these women had ideas in the political realm and firm notions on what was needed. Especially when Hannah Abbott’s grandmother became the new Minister for Magic.

Sitting in his armchair by his fireside provided Snape with the kind of intellectual stimulation that he had rarely experienced since his days as a student. He grew to love the fact that, of an evening, he could look around his sitting room to find Parkinson sprawled at one end of his couch, commenting – in the best of Slytherin snark tradition – on the events of the day as she read aloud from the Daily Prophet. He was delighted by Bones, who shared the couch at the other end, usually head on the armrest, legs over the back, and her ability to hear behind the trite and pull out the truth. Bullstrode, lying on her stomach in front of his fire, chin resting on folded arms, never said much, but when she did, Snape often heard himself laughing aloud with the others at the mordant wit he doubted she herself had known she possessed.

Abbott would pace and gesture as she contributed the latest political gossip from home. Her mother was more socialite than politician and there were a great many parties to celebrate the demise of the Dark Lord and his acolytes, as well as the election of the new Minister. Patil, whose father heavily invested in the Markets, sat on the ottoman at Snape’s feet and provided financial information that had everyone’s vaults, including Snape’s own, grow in value.

Granger had taken over his desk. She was, of course, interested in all but was never without a book or an assignment. Snape respected her ability to be seemingly working then looking up and tossing in some comment that indicated that she was as good as he was at multi-tasking. She was also the one who gradually turned the meetings to NEWTs work which allowed Snape to appreciate the combined intelligence of these women.

So he was not surprised to hear, as he sat in his usual dark corner of the staff room, Dumbledore read the names of the top students in each NEWT domain. His women – his ‘hareem’ – had walked away with almost all the prizes. Granger had taken Arithmancy and Transfiguration; Parkinson, Potions; Bones, Charms; Abbott, History of Magic; Bullstrode, Herbology; Patil, Divinations and Ancient Runes.

Potter had been awarded the top mark in Defense, even though he hadn’t taken the exam. Parkinson had come in second and she had.

All in all, his six women had walked off with a total of 17 of the top 20 placings. The female portion of the school cheered that accomplishment loudly at the Leaving banquet.

And he thought that would be it. As Snape snuck away from the banquet, returning to his own rooms, he knew that he would miss that eight o’clock ward chime more than he had probably missed anything else in his life.

When the knock came at the door, startling him, it was closer to midnight.

He looked up from the book he’d been reading and wondered who it could be. At that time, it was probably Dumbledore, come to wind down from his usual sugar high at the conclusion of these affairs.

Instead it was Granger. And as she stepped in, the others, one by one followed her.

And one by one, they dropped their robes.

Snape hadn’t been aware there could be that much variety in women’s undergarments. Or that Bullstrode, who looked squarish in build with her robes on, actually had a rather appealing shape.

He did protest. He did point out that he was their teacher and...

But by then, Granger had removed his robe; Parkinson had begun working on the buttons of his suit jacket; Patil, on those at his ankles; Abbott had called up glasses for the magnum of Champagne Bones was opening; and Bullstrode was setting up wards so that they would not be disturbed.

They were, after all, as Granger pointed out, of age and no longer his students.

And far more experienced and imaginative than Snape would have thought. Even he was unfamiliar with some of the permutations and combinations.

He awoke, alone, in the afternoon, to a bedroom redolent with the perfume of sex and with a sense of well-being that was worthy of any Order of Merlin, First Class.

With memories that made him smile all through the summer, Snape worked in his laboratory, trying to formulate a scent that would remind him of that private celebration.

And that, he thought, was really that.

Except that the first evening of the new academic year, the chime on the ward let him know that someone was at his door.

He looked up from his work to see Ginny Weasley standing there, wondering aloud if she might come in.

Snape’s Hareem was the once more the cause of gossip and yes, even envy on some parts, in the staff room.

And Snape developed a new perfume the following summer, all the while whistling happily to himself.

His former hareem didn’t forget him. The man who had rarely received an owl at the head table during the mail run now carried owl treats in his robe pockets. Over the years, the next Headmaster was heard to comment that at Yule and a certain date in January, he had learnt to ask the house elves to serve breakfast after the mail run at the head table so that his staff could actually find the food under the deluge of gifts and well wishes.

Snape never became Headmaster. Not even Deputy Headmaster. He remained a potions instructor at Hogwarts School of Wizardry and Witchcraft until the day he retired.

But he was a surprisingly powerful and influential wizard for all that. For many of his hareem – not that they called themselves that: they preferred ‘Snape’s Regiment’ and even had their own signet ring – had, over the years, gradually assumed positions of power. He was much in call for his input.

And he made, over the years, a small fortune with his line of perfumes.

He decided it was time to retire the day that Granger’s grand-daughter used the password to enter his quarters.

His retirement party was a private affair, held behind closed and guarded doors at the Ministry. Minister Granger herself acted as Mistress of Ceremonies for a celebration that gathered together the most influential and powerful witches of any time. One of the guards mentioned to the others that should that hall implode, there would probably follow the disintegration of the Wizarding World as they knew it.

Mind, commented another, the next morning when the room emptied, they certainly knew how to party. The place was in shambles.

And Snape made another small fortune with his last perfume.


End file.
